I’ve never heard of or had any microswitches go bad with my sanwa jlf or buttons, but last night I had some intermittent problems with my forward input so i’m just curious if the microswitch in my JLF went bad. This JLF was included with my TE stick and was used for about 1 1/2 years.

There really isn’t much else I can say other than the direction stopped working for a few seconds and started working again. This intermittent issue occurred two or three times within a four hour span. It’s too intermittent for me to really want to put up and really “test” it again. I had a replacement pcb so I just put it in and haven’t had an issue again yet, but I haven’t played on it as long.

To note, nothing in the stick has been touched as far as wiring goes and has been awesome for the past 8-9 months.

So back to the reason for the thread, has anyone ever experienced a microswitch going bad with their sanwas?

im not sure if they can really “go bad”… but i’ve had a few issues where there might be some dirt or a bit of wear on the metal inside the switch itself, which can cause some issue. its pretty easy to pry the top off the switches so you can peak inside them.

They do go bad eventually. If you have an arcade environment where kids and people play the game for hours on end this will happen. the springs inside the micro switches or pivot mechanism will eventually deteriorate, they are made of metal after all.

From what I’ve read the standard switches are durability tested for 10 million presses. That doesn’t account for any abuse outside normal usage though.
The problem you describe does sound more like a wiring / PCB issue than a physical malfunction of the switch.

I’ve had a couple of Cherry switches go bad. The easiest way to test is to connect the ground and signal quick disconnects. If it fires normally then the microswitch is more than likely the problem.

Just a quick question since you’ve had cherry switches go bad. What is the reason for them going bad? (Assuming there is no abuse). Physically the inside of the microswitch looks fine. I’ve also owned mice in the past where the buttons went out on me (also a microswitch issue). I’m just trying to have an understanding of how a microswitch goes bad.